The Porats spoke Yiddish at home - or, rather, in the tent that passed for home - and struggled to learn Hebrew. They were imbued with the excitement of the time and the place. In due course, Benny became the construction manager of S'dot Yam kibbutz, married Bella, a pretty young Pole who managed the kitchen, and lived happily ever after.
"The beginning was very hard, but very good," he recalls. "We were happy, because we felt that we were building a settlement for Israel's future. It was wonderful to create in stone in the sand dunes something that would live long after us."
There, then, is a tiny, individual fragment of the romance of Israel's birth.
Today, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict torments the Middle East and troubles the world, not least in the wake of the recent Palestinian elections and the success of Hamas. None of us should forget the nation's beginnings, a saga to move the stony-hearted.
Long before Hitler was even heard of, Jews who suffered persecution at the hands of oppressors, above all, the victims of Russian and Polish pogroms, dreamt of finding a place where they might live freely. The Zionist ideal was first articulated by the Hungarian Theodor Herzl, in his 1896 book, The Jewish State. Its publication unleashed a controversy that racked world Jewry through the succeeding half-century, and prompted the creation of the Zionist movement. Many Jews argued that to seek a Jewish nation was to acknowledge their failure to live within Gentile civilisation.
Yet the idea caught the imagination of some formidable minds, who set about promoting it, and of some rich Jews, who raised the money for it. Momentum was increased by a fresh wave of Russian pogroms in 1903. The first trickle of settlers moved to Turkish-ruled Palestine, and began a long, harsh struggle to build lives there. The decisive step came in 1917, when the British foreign secretary, Lord Balfour, wrote to Dr Chaim Weizmann, a prime mover in the Zionist movement and later the first president of Israel, declaring the government's principled support for a "Jewish national home" in Palestine. This was the era in which great imperial powers still felt free to draw frontiers, place and displace peoples, make and unmake states.
After Turkey was vanquished in 1918, Palestine became a British trusteeship. Through the next 29 years, Britain held political responsibility for the old biblical provinces in which the painful drama of Israel's creation was played out. Through the 1920s and 30s, as Jewish immigration to Palestine increased, so too did the resentment and hostility of Arab residents. This spilt over into violence, for which extremists in both communities shared blame. The Jews, boundlessly energetic and ingenious amid this place of stone and sand, where they pioneered irrigation, said of the Arabs: "What do they know of this land, who did nothing with it for almost 2,000 years?" The Arabs said: "What have Jews to do with this place, which has been ours beyond human memory?"
Terrorism became commonplace. In addition to inter-communal Arab and Jewish atrocities, there was rising Jewish violence against the British mandate and its representatives, climaxing in the 1944 murder of the British minister resident in the Middle East, Lord Moyne, by the Stern gang. The second world war's ending and the revelation of the Holocaust precipitated crisis. The slaughter of 6m Jews generated a fervour among the survivors about creating a Jewish state in which such things could never happen again. The British, bankrupt and exhausted, struggled ineffectually to stem Jewish immigration and arms-smuggling to Palestine, and to control rising violence.
As the United Nations, Britain, America and the Zionist leadership argued over prospective boundaries, the struggle on the ground between local Jewish and Arab communities escalated. In October 1947, the UN voted to partition historic Palestine between Jews and Arabs. As Jews danced in the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, David Ben-Gurion, soon to be Israel's prime minister, declared: "After a darkness of 2,000 years, the dawn of redemption has broken." In the spring of 1948, the British abandoned Palestine amid bloody chaos. The state of Israel was proclaimed at the Tel Aviv Museum at 4pm on May 14. The US and Soviet Union were among the first to grant recognition. That night, the armies of Israel's Arab neighbours launched an assault by land and air, designed to crush the Jewish state at birth. Their attempt failed, after months of savage fighting.
In their hundreds of thousands, Arabs fled from land held or threatened by Israeli forces. They were herded into refugee camps in Gaza and on the West Bank, to serve as political pawns of Israeli and Arab governments alike through the decades that followed. Israel was left gasping, holding barely defensible frontiers under Arab guns, having secured only a portion of Jerusalem, and with its foes irreconcilably committed to its destruction. The years that followed were extraordinarily harsh for almost every man, woman and child living in the country. From all over the Middle East, the new state sought to gather in Jewish fugitives and migrants. With shovels and bulldozers, axes and rifles, they strove to cultivate and secure the land they had won.
From Europe, new Israelis came, bewildered and penniless, so many bearing the tattoos and memories of Hitler's concentration camps. Some went to live on collective farms, the kibbutzim, which were among Israel's most imaginative innovations. They worked all the hours God made, and then spent more manning their defences. Many were city people who knew nothing of the land and had to learn.
The world's Jews sent them money, though never enough. Israel's first generation adopted a style of life and of government studied in its informality. Few, even among government ministers, wore neckties or maintained the elaborate social pretensions of Europe. Women became comrades in the struggle rather than domestic appendages. As they shed the pallor of the ghetto, young Israelis even began to look different, becoming tough, bronzed, famously feisty warriors and farmers.
Theodore Herzl had dreamt fancifully of Israel as a constitutional monarchy. The country that evolved in the 1940s and 50s was socialistic in character, heedless of precedents or hierarchies, save perhaps those of the Old Testament. The army - zahal, as Israelis called it - became one of the proudest and most effective institutions of the state. More than anything else, the common experience of service in uniform forged Israeli identity. Zahal's commanders, men like Moshe Dayan, Yigal Allon and Yitzhak Rabin, became national heroes, sharing notable characteristics: bold and original to the point of recklessness; imbued with the knowledge that the first big battle they lost could be the last for their country.
Almost every Israeli who lived through those times recalled an exhilaration of creation, struggle, a moral purity, which they felt was later lost as the country became a modern state.
All these things are captured in Goldman's pictures, images of a lost age. Back in S'dot Yam kibbutz, 50 years on, Benny Porat laments much that has changed. "Today's Israel is very far from our dreams in those days," he says. "My dream was of an Israel of unity. We thought we would create a new life here, with more social equality.
"We thought it would endure for ever as a collective system. Yet so much has changed in the outside world that it has influenced our young people to want what they have seen outside. Today, Israel is rich in material things but poor in others - the things of the mind.
"Only the prophets know what Israel's future will be. In the Middle East, no one can guess, because it is always unexpected." Today many Israelis are as dismayed as Benny Porat by what their society has lost since its pioneer days. They lived through a time when miracles seemed possible. From the tragedy of European Jewry, something remarkable was created.
It was only later, much later, that the parallel tragedy of the Palestinian-Arab people became apparent. Many Israelis said in 1948, and say now: "Arabs have many lands. We have only one small place - the Promised Land." Whatever view one takes of modern Israel, it remains extraordinary what was built there, upon rock and sand.
